ZOOM ONLY EVENT
"Jolly Good Trick(s)": Ancient Egyptian Magic in Late Victorian Popular Culture
In 1890 the spiritualist medium Elizabeth d'Esperance claimed to materialise a seven-foot lily in a darkened séance room, with a piece of mummy bandage wrapped about its stem. Spirit photographers alleged to have captured ancient Egyptian presences in their images, including Cleopatra VII. On stage, magicians were performing in venues where neo-pharaonic architecture lent an air of mystery and gravitas to the proceedings. Meanwhile, the popular novelist Edith Nesbit consulted E. A. Wallis Budge, the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, to aid her in infusing her novel, The Story of the Amulet (1906), with Egyptologically-informed details. In this talk, we will take stock of the varied ways in which ancient Egyptian magic manifested in the popular culture of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, revealing how Egypt was used as a marker of authenticity and of the possibilities of a very real occult power that continued to manifest in the modern world.
Eleanor Dobson is Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt (UCL Press, 2022).
Entry: £5 members, £7 non-members